#fragility

Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity. ↗

— Jose Saramago

#discovered #either #experienced #experiencing #fragility

..It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#fragility #dreams

The Fly Little Fly Thy summers play, My thoughtless hand Has brush'd away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance And drink & sing: Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing. If thought is life And strength & breath: And the want Of thought is death; Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die ↗

— William Blake

#fragility-of-life #art

De pronto la miro y ya no está. Vuelvo a mirarla, la define su ausencia. Ha ido a unirse a lago que le da fuerza y no sé lo que es. No puedo seguirla, no entiendo hacia qué espacio invisible se ha dirigido, qué aire inefable la resguarda y la aísla; desde luego ya no está en el mundo y por más que manoteo no me ve, permanece siempre fuera de mi alcance. Sé que mi amor la sustenta, claro, pero su ausencia es sólo suya y en ella no tengo cabida. ↗

— Elena Poniatowska

#fragility #love #mother-daughter-relationship #relación-madre-e-hija #vínculos

Or maybe it's just that beautiful things are so easily broken by the world. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#fragility #jocelyn-fray #beauty

He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal-logical-admirable refusal-to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places!, in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die. ↗

— Taiye Selasi

#childbirth #fragility #ghana #life #philosophy

Love’s like an egg. Break it, and you might still have almost every bit of yolk and white, but there’s no way you’re getting that back in the shell. And even if you could, there’d be still all the cracks. ↗

— Cath Crowley

#love #love

We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility. ↗

— Malcolm Gladwell

#appreciate #come #first #first impressions #fragility